A few days ago, Tesla, one of the leading electric vehicle (EV) manufacturers in the world (and arguably the most technologically advanced producer of electric vehicles) could barely wait to make one of their most important announcements to date: they’d turned a profit for their quarterly report in the hundreds of millions of dollars. This may be the last nail in the coffin against the automotive industry’s blockade on electric vehicles. Since EVs undercut the massive investment and infrastructure that underpins the fossil fuel driven vehicles we know, their manufacture and sale has been forestalled for decades. The automotive industry blockade on EV production is crumbling so quickly that old guard members of internal combustion engines (ICE) are scrambling to jump on the bandwagon. Even such elite combustion engine producers such as Jaguar and Ferrari have relented to the inevitable– the mystique and perfection of the combustion engine is facing certain obsolescence. Companies making their mark in EV: Tesla (all vehicles), Nissan (LEAF), Chevy (Bolt), Ford (Fusion), and BMW (i3). Volkswagen, mired in scandal after diesel-gate, is hoping that their production of EV will do something to restore a badly damaged reputation. Even Dyson, a known purveyor of vacuum cleaners, is said to be producing an EV, so much simpler is the EV powertrain to manufacture than an ICE.
Sandy Munro, one such old guard automotive expert, operates a company (Munro and Associates) known for tearing apart vehicles to write elaborate reverse-engineered blueprints and reports on build (and sell those reports to the competition at an astonishing cost of $40,000-$80,000). In April 2018, Munro and Assoc., having gotten a hold of and disassembled a Tesla Model 3, have said some truly astonishing things. Fit and finish issues aside, they believe that Tesla is 3-4 years in advance of any other company for two key components: the electronics and the battery. First the electronics: Tesla prides itself on its fully electronic and electrified (as opposed to mechanical) features such as the handles and openings, screens, piloting, and inevitably, steering. The Munro tear-down pulled cutting-edge computing components produced by Nvidia – for those who play Xbox or other advanced video games, this might come as a revelation. All these features parallel the ever more streamlined electronic interfaces we see every day, from our phones to check-out at The Home Depot. Tesla is making a dash, along with many others, for the fully-automated, self-driving vehicle brigade. Significantly, Elon Musk, Tesla’s celebrity CEO, has publicly stated that a privately-owned Tesla vehicle will eventually have the capability of joining a self-driving automated Tesla fleet at any time the owner chooses. This fleet of autopiloted vehicles will compete directly with Uber and Waymo (by Alphabet). The implications for fleet life-cycle should be immediately evident. The idle vehicle parked in the driveway or parking lot will probably become obsolete and vehicles lifetime miles may reach the 1 million mark.
There is, however, one major limitation: with Tesla and other manufacturers of EV, the all-important battery has no clear end-of-life strategy in place for any manufacturer, anywhere, and no clear path for recovery of valuable raw materials. Put another way: every automotive company in the world is currently attempting to make a battery that charges faster, that holds more charge, that withstands temperature fluctuation, that is safer. However, not a report has stressed the obvious need to accommodate a fleet of batteries that turns over every 4-8 years. The lithium-ion battery with a cathode combination of lithium, nickel, cobalt, aluminum oxide will become a valuable commodity as the stores of raw materials dwindle.
Before cellular phones, and before the 2007 release of the iPhone, we never imagined upgrading our phones every year or every few years. Now, the world is flooded with electronic waste because turnover is not only fast, but essential to day to day functionality. Similarly, we did not come into our driver’s licenses in a world where vehicles are updated and upgraded every few years. But that is exactly what will happen: lifetimes of vehicles should see a dramatic decrease and production of entire national fleets will turn over quickly. As such, the world will eventually be flooded 1-ton battery packs that are exhausted from 1,000,000 vehicles miles over 4-8 years of use. And those batteries must be recycled – they must for environmental and economic reasons.
EVs boast significant advantages over traditional ICE vehicles – they are safer, cheaper to maintain, and usually significantly more energy efficient. The fact that EVs draw their power from the electric grid, rather than a tank of gasoline, means that they create no diffuse automotive emissions. Instead, CO2 and other emissions are generated at the power plant level; these point sources have greater emissions controls in place and, typically, are more efficient with the generation of power from a fossil fuel feedstock. As power grids draw more and more energy from wind, water, solar or geothermal sources, the fleet of EVs will automatically become carbon neutral tools, obviating the need for a retrofit. However, because EVs need so much less – cheaper repairs, and 20-30% smaller demands on fossil fuel consumption – they threaten markets that combustion vehicles have traditionally sustained. Yet this economic model of vehicle production and consumption will also become obsolete, since the nature of the engine changes the nature of use, and ultimately product life-cycles. We have a chance to play an integral role in that product life-cycle by developing technologies that allow manufacturers to accept exhausted vehicles in enable the market drive toward vehicle upgrade.
The Swette Center hosts experts in metals recovery in waste streams, waste handling, remediation, and electrochemistry. We are also a group that is increasingly aware of our own sustainability footprint — I know that we have found tremendous inspiration in plastics, and organics waste in our celebrations. There is so much more to do. With this post, I’d like to invite you all to take a prescient look at the changing world and see what we can do to join it.
–Burcu
P.S. No more plastic bottles for our next picnic!
Burcu Yavuz is a PhD Student in Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering in the Ira A Fulton Schools of Engineering. She specializes in bioremediation of heavy hydrocarbon-contaminated soils.